


I Know What I'm Doing

by lolwut



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, F/M, Gen, M/M, Onesided Nile Dawk/Erwin Smith
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-01-19
Updated: 2014-01-18
Packaged: 2018-01-09 05:45:59
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,491
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1142176
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lolwut/pseuds/lolwut
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nile Dawk knew what he was doing with his life...yeah. Definitely. A student at Sina University, living with his two long time friends Mike Zacharius and Erwin Smith, Nile knew exactly what he was doing with his life. Soccer, school, and a shitty part-time job. Never mind the mooching semi-roommates he kept and the giant secret about his sexuality. No, he knew exactly what he was doing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I Know What I'm Doing

**Author's Note:**

> Okay, so this is so much more comedy than my last work, much more along the lines of 'Communication'. Probably more comedy than that, maybe? I'm not funny, so? I don't know. Let me know what you think. I'll continue this if you guys like it, if not, I'll leave it as a one-shot. It all depends on demand. It's super short, but if you guys want more, let me know, and my next update can be much, much longer.

You could say that Nile Dawk was the jealous friend with maybe a side of bad-tempered. Or you could say that he had a misguided way of caring about his friends and had valid reasons for disliking the people that he did. You could also say that Mike had ambled through their living arrangements without ever rocking the boat simply to avoid Nile bitching, or you could say that he was the solid foundation of their friendships. You could say that Erwin was manipulative, or you could say he had a natural talent for the business world.

You could say that Levi was unlikable at best and that Hanji was a dirty freeloader, and if you were Nile, you wouldn’t say anything else about them because that was the end of it.

Nile Dawk had been living with Mike Zacharius and Erwin Smith for two full years now. Their first year of university Nile had been roomed at random with some guy that he had grown to hate, and signed a lease to live with his two longtime friends without hesitation for the following year. They had upgraded to the duplex they currently found themselves in, and they had simple dynamics that worked for them. Mike cooked, Erwin was always good for borrowing money when you were short on rent, and if your drunk ass needed a ride home from the middle of nowhere at some ungodly hour, Nile was your guy. Nile liked things that way. Okay, so no, he didn’t always like picking up his friends in the dead of night at seedy bars while they were too slammed to even walk a straight line to the car, but he liked the way their group fit together. It was nice. Nile didn’t want it to change, which was a problem because he had recently been the cause of a rather large shift in their routines.

The three of them had met in high school on a soccer team, and while only Erwin had been quite good enough to enter university on an athletic scholarship, he and Mike were still able to make the team. In the years following, Erwin had become captain and Mike his co-captain, the sport rather consuming their lives during the season. This fact made Nile’s current situation difficult, as last year he had injured his knee and had been advised to take the rest of the season off to avoid requiring surgery. He and Erwin had talked at length about it and his friend supported his decision to take the down time, but Nile had not tried out again this season and nobody had spoken a word about it. It was somewhat of an elephant in the room, and there was hesitation each time the two left for practice leaving Nile behind. He felt a quiet guilt that he could not shake no matter how much he simply did not want to play anymore.

Considering that he had chosen Sina University for the sole purpose of playing soccer there, he was at a bit of a crossroads. He was not willing to admit that his life aspirations had changed drastically and that he essentially had no idea what to do with his life. He wished that he could be more like Erwin, who was a business major at the top of his class and was breezing through college on his scholarship, or Mike, who ‘studied’ kinesiology (he never studied, Nile had never seen him crack open a book, not once) and worked nights bouncing at a local bar on top of soccer and never seemed to break a sweat over any of it.

Nile couldn’t even take the required twelve credits a semester and work his shitty part-time job without having a quarter-life crisis.

It didn’t help matters that his lack of life direction was not the only thing that he was not admitting. Nile Dawk wanted so badly to be unquestionably heterosexual and this clashed greatly with the fact that he thought his longtime friend and roommate Erwin Smith was cut like a Greek god. The fact that Erwin liked to drift about the house in nothing but sweats and was possibly pursuing their neighbor (male, which was initially surprising, but Erwin had always been hard to pin down in all respects) did not make the closet any less uncomfortable.

It was weird, because it was Erwin, and usually he loved and hated his friend in equal parts, and he knew that it was important to make efforts not to be attracted to him – but there was no harm in secretly admiring a man carved out like a model, except for the part where he was trying to be straight.

He got the feeling, for whatever reason, that Mike knew about all of this. He didn’t know how the man would know, or why he had the feeling, but he had nearly accepted it as unconfirmed fact. Mike always figured out his secrets, but the best thing about Mike was that he made a very effective black box. You could chew his ear off and none of the details ever saw the light of day again.

When Nile returned from class that day Hanji Zoe was decorating their couch with her unconscious form, one arm and leg hanging off the side and a line of flattering drool escaping the side of her mouth. He scowled.

“When’s she leaving?” He called out into the house. When silence answered him, he realized that Erwin and Mike were likely still at practice, and so he passed into the kitchen while grumbling about freeloading and threw his backpack into a chair. He could answer his own question, if he really wanted to – never. Hanji Zoe was never leaving, because she refused to stop breaking her bank account with expensive flasks and beakers and start paying her damn rent.

“What,” Nile articulated when he swung open the fridge to find its contents organized by food group. The large stack of meats in the corner (arranged by size) and sparseness of the rest of the space gave it away. He closed the door again, unamused.

_‘Don’t you have enough sausage in this place as it is. Get something green, you’re seriously lacking’_

The note glared at him from its place on the fridge door, written in immaculate handwriting. Nile narrowed his eyes and pulled a pen from a nearby drawer.

_‘Maybe if you had more of something green you could afford to buy your own food and quit mooching off of us’_

He left for his room, the one space in the house that he had to himself (and usually he was not so blessed) and struggled with studying for an hour before he returned to the fridge to loot absentmindedly again.

_‘Fuck yourself, Dawk, I wipe my ass with your mom’s paychecks’_

Nile scowled because the swift reply probably meant that the midget was here, in his home, likely warming up Erwin’s bed while he was at practice. Nile resisted the urge to vomit. There was also a crudely drawn marijuana leaf on the note, but Hanji was missing from the couch, so Nile assumed that it was not Levi’s doing.

He opened the silverware drawer to find it sorted neatly. He wondered briefly if Levi was actually a student at all or was only masquerading as one and just compulsively organized other people’s things until the sun went down.

It was only a short time before Mike and Erwin returned, sweaty and in uniform. There was that familiar pang of having missed something that he should have been a part of, but Nile shoved it aside and threw a frozen dinner into the microwave with excessive force.

“What’s for dinner?” Hanji’s voice floated up the stairwell from the basement. Nile had been hoping that she had finally gone home. He glanced back at the microwave where his meal was heating up and didn’t make any offers.

“I’ll make something,” luckily, Mike did, and he heard Hanji clapping her hands with delighted approval. Erwin made a beeline for the stairs, heading upward to their rooms. Erwin and Nile’s rooms were directly beside one another, and so their beds pressed against the same wall from either side.

This meant that when he retired later on, he could hear it perfectly as the blonde’s bed thumped up against the wall all fucking night. Perhaps Erwin's potential for pursuing their neighbor was not as unclear as he had previously thought. 

“Oh my God,” he pulled a pillow over his head. He considered crawling into Mike’s bed, as the man had gone to work and wouldn’t be back until morning. He also considered praying for some higher power to mercifully strike him down.

He managed to fall asleep in spite of the sound eventually, but the thing about living with Erwin and Mike was that they always had tomorrow to torture him anew.


End file.
